Tag: Egypt June30

In our latest video from the Arab world expert, Hanna notes how frequently the West oversimplifies Islamism:

Along these lines, H.A. Hellyer points out the overly binary way that last week’s violence has been interpreted, both in and outside of the Egypt:

Pro-Morsi campaigners insist that the Muslim Brotherhood is non-violent and has no weaponry, and they focus all attention on the killings that took place at the pro-Morsi sit-in in front of the Republican Guard, at the hands of state forces. On the other side, anti-Morsi commentators argue that the Brotherhood is essentially a militia; that the sit-in was armed; and that the Brotherhood tries to redirect attention to the deaths that have taken place elsewhere at the hands of pro-Morsi activists. The media in Egypt is primarily imbued with the latter, with little nuance — the international media and pro-Morsi outlets in the region are generally concerned only with the first narrative.

Again, reality lies in between, and with elements of both.

The Muslim Brotherhood undoubtedly has weaponry — such was evident when the headquarters was attacked during the uprising. However, there is really no evidence that heavy weaponry was at the sit-in — at best, according to eye-witnesses and civil rights groups, the weaponry was mediocre and much of it homemade. Certainly, it would be difficult for anyone to justify the break up of a sit-in, resulting in dozens of casualties, with the level of firepower used by the army. One suspects that privately the state agrees, and that this was a mistake arising from a tense situation and probably Morsi-supporters resisting arrest — but we will probably never hear that line in any state broadcast. At the same time, the reality is that on top of this tragedy, many civilians have been attacked, and killed, by pro-Morsi forces around the country in the past week — and the killings are often sectarian.

Of course, recognizing the truth of both narratives, at the moment, is unthinkable. Sins of omission, as well as commission, are rife — either due to unfamiliarity with Egypt altogether, or clearly partisan agendas. Objective media is, unfortunately, rare indeed. The importance of that kind of coverage and analysis cannot be overestimated at such a crucial time — not simply because good information is rare to come by, but because so much poor disinformation is so utterly common. On Egypt, right now, truth really is the greatest victim. It is a victim worth rescuing, and right now, it seems that the best source of information is going to be direct access to eyewitnesses of particular controversies, as well as civil rights and human rights organizations.

Michael Wahid Hanna is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where he works on issues of international security, international law, and US foreign policy in the broader Middle East and South Asia. He appears regularly on NPR, BBC, and al-Jazeera. Additionally, his Twitter feed is a must-read for anyone interested in Egyptian politics. Our ongoing coverage of the current events in Egypt is here. Michael’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Michael Hanna points out how shocking it was for the June 30th protests to not only come together as fast as they did, but grow to a size that far eclipsed the protests of 2011:

Nisral Nasr thinks the political landscape in Egypt is too foggy to tell whether the coup will be in the service of democracy:

There is no particular reason for now to believe that the Egyptian Armed Forces are the modernizers envisaged by American academics in the 1960s.  Nor is there reason to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood is the carrier of democratization through an Islamic state as envisaged in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Of course the governments after 1952, invariably led by Army officers, pursued industrialization policies for strategic reasons.  So, too, the Muslim Brotherhood leadership pursued open elections for their own strategic reasons.  Neither the Army nor the MB are or were particularly committed to the wider principles that academics like to read into these policy choices.

Sarah Carr declares that “the debate is semantic and tedious, and the nomenclature will not be decided now”:

I will not weigh in on the coup/revolution debate other than to say millions of Egyptians were on the ground demanding Morsi’s removal while military jets drew hearts in the skies above them, and then Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced that Morsi had (forcibly) buggered off. Nothing has changed. The real revolution will happen when army involvement in politics is a distant relic of history.

Elsewhere, the Big Picture is up with a new gallery compiled from the past week in Egypt.

Michael Wahid Hanna is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where he works on issues of international security, international law, and US foreign policy in the broader Middle East and South Asia. He appears regularly on NPR, BBC, and al-Jazeera. Additionally, his Twitter feed is a must-read for anyone interested in Egyptian politics. Our ongoing coverage of the current events in Egypt is here. Michael’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Ali Gharib sides with Elliott Abrams on aid to Egypt. He doubts the withdrawal of US money will undermine the country’s ailing economy:

[A] common objection goes like this: Egypt is in tough economic straits, and cutting off both military and economic aid could plunge the whole economy—and society—into a chaotic tailspin. (Because the military dominates the economy, controlling between 10 and 30 percent of it, the military aid factors in here too.) Along with various members of Congress, Secretary of State John Kerry made this point: ”A hold up of aid might contribute to the chaos that may ensue because of their collapsing economy,” Kerry said. “Their biggest problem is a collapsing economy.”

The U.S. gives about $1.5 billion total in aid to Egypt. Since Morsi’s ouster, Gulf Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates pledged $12 billion—which appears to not be directed solely at the military. In other words, the Gulf Arabs have already rushed to fill the breach, with more—and more flexible—aid. The Egyptian economy won’t be peachy keen any time soon, but U.S. aid, in the context of the Gulf Arab money, will hardly make or break it.

Max Fisher counts Hagel’s close relationship with the head of the army as another reason we haven’t called it a coup and suspended aid:

The Egyptian defense minister who officially announced on state TV that the military had removed Morsi, a general named Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, also turns out to be friendly with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, according to a revealing story by The Wall Street Journal. They’re not old fishing buddies, exactly, but they had lunch two months ago, the foundation of a personal relationship that was, according to a senior administration official who spoke to the Journal, “basically the only viable channel of communication during the crisis.”

For the Obama administration, then, alienating Sissi would have left the United States without a “viable channel of communication” with one of its most important allies in the Middle East. That raises the potential costs of condemning the coup significantly, and may help explain why the United States is eager to preserve the relationship.

More Dish on the debate over Egypt’s aid here, here and here.

Doug Bandow profiles Qatar, the minuscule nation throwing more and more weight around in the Middle East:

This activist foreign policy rests on a docile population at home. Observed Jane Kinninmont of Chatham House: “Qatar’s behavior is explained partly by its complete lack of fear of domestic unrest.” As a result, Sheikh Hamad has given his own people none of the democratic freedoms he promotes abroad. [Christopher] Blanchard called the emir’s course one of “very limited political liberalization.” The only opinions that matter are those of members of the ruling family. Indeed, the baby steps taken, including formally granting the franchise to women, “constitute a facet of the Qatari state-branding strategy, since they are designed to legitimize the Qatari regime in the eyes of the international community,” argued [Professor Sultan] Bakarat.

But not all of Qatar’s foreign policy decisions have paid off. Jeffrey Goldberg notes that “Qatar pumped a lot of money into Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood government” and that “Mursi represented its main chance to advance the cause of Islamic fundamentalism.” Goldberg also takes Qatar-funded Al Jazeera to task for spreading Muslim Brotherhood’s bile:

If it’s been a bad week for Qatar and Al Jazeera, it’s been a very bad week for the network’s star broadcaster, the televangelist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Sunni cleric who is a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qaradawi has been Al Jazeera’s most important star for many years. His show, “Shariah and Life,” is seen by millions across the Middle East.

As I reported this week, Qaradawi is an extremist’s extremist: He endorses female genital mutilation (he doesn’t refer to it that way, of course); he has called for the punishment of gay people; he has provided theological justification to insurgents who targeted American troops for death in Iraq (though he’s hypocritically silent on the decision of his Qatari patrons to allow the U.S. to locate a Central Command headquarters on their soil); he has defended the idea that the penalty for some Muslims who leave Islam should be death; and also, by the way, he believes that Hitler’s Final Solution was a nifty idea.

Claire Berlinski notices how the Egyptian coup has given Turkey’s prime minister another chance to steer the media away from protests in Istanbul, which have not subsided:

[T]he Gezi protests were so massive, and so widely publicized, even internationally, that none of us could figure out how he’d change the subject this time, even with the customary media lockdown. “Frankly,” I said to a friend, “the only way he could do it is by announcing that he’s always felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body and announcing that he’s scheduled himself for immediate gender reassignment surgery.”

I was wrong. God intervened. He handed Erdoğan a coup in Egypt, instead.

Now, to put this in context, the Turkish media barely noticed the coup in Mali, and I’d be astonished if more than 100 Turks were aware that in recent years there have also been coups in Honduras, Guinea-Bissau and Niger. But as of the Fourth of July, one would have thought, from reading the local press, that one was not in Turkey but in Egypt, which was more than passing strange. And while the world seems to believe the Egyptian coup was a “nightmare” for Erdoğan, putting an end to his ambitious foreign policy fantasies (and this is true), it it important to understand that it was simultaneously a dream come true, not only turning all foreign attention away from Turkey, but enabling him to turn all domestic attention away from Turkey, and lending credibility to his absurd claims that the Gezi Park protesters were in fact coup-plotters, despite extensive, serious research indicating that they were anything but.

Recent Dish on Turkey here, here and here.